When a Thingamado Is a Thingamadon't

"Are there four more boring words in the English language than 'Tony Kushner's new play'? If there are, I am sure he has written them as dialogue."

I would say they're rivaled only by those three dreaded words 'Arthur Miller revival,' which as we shall see is terribly apropos:

I happened to catch him kvelling with Kurt Andersen over the weekend--I was in the garden, and I nearly stomped a tomato: Andersen makes some banal comparison between a bit of scripted crosstalk and a Twitter feed, and Kushner pushes his glasses up his nose and says, Well, I have never seen a Twitter feed, and then they both laugh, even though this suggests a playwright whose, ahem, political consciousness is frozen right around the opening scene of Bye Bye Birdie. The new play is called The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, a title that makes a whalesong of anachronism. Is that 1989 calling on the landline? The whole thing suggests a 4-hour-long craiglist m4m post in which some dusty thirty-nine-year-old laments his invisibility to the shining abdominals at the gay bar, a complaint made all the more pathetic by his having totally missed the fact that these little Adonises are losers too, and all the cool gay kids, like their straight counterparts, are wearing bad moustaches and showing off their first season of chest hair. Well, the Intelligent Homosexual is some sort of cryptoarthurmiller thingamado in which an extended family--yes, a kitchen-sink extended family drama, yoy and double-yoy--gather together to confront Life In the Gloaming of Old Certainties. Talk about a one-trick pony.

Cowinkadinkily, a couple of Fridays ago I was down at Joe's Pub to catch the Alley of the Dolls show presented by the fabulous dancer-choreographer Nicole Wolcott (no relation) and Vanessa Walters, and availed myself of the men's room on the premises, which has individual stalls, so conducive to private thoughts. And as I'm peeing with laser precision, something I take pride in, staff members from the Public Theater were calling into the men's room, "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide will be starting in five minutes...if you have tickets to The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide, please be advised that it will be starting in five minutes..."

And I thought, I'd rather stay in this stall for the next three hours than sit through that damned thing.

Fortunately, I didn't have to do either!

There's been a lot of controversy in the press over Kushner's being denied an honorary degree by CUNY, a decision that--predictably--has been reversed. While it was absurd to have played the Israel card to deny or delay Kushner an honorary degree, it's hardly worth high dudgeon--this whole business of doling out "honorary degrees" is a publicity racket, with almost anyone of celebrity visibility or political notoriety receiving degrees for doing none of the work that everyone in the graduating class has to pretend to do. Hell, Donald Rumsfeld has at least 11 honorary degrees, Bill Cosby has more than a dozen, so how much can any of these mean?

I mean, it's not as if Tony Kushner has gone un-awarded in his career, a victim of cold neglect. The last thing we should be doing is giving him an opportunity to make another speech.